C.I.A. Expands Its Inquiry Into Interrogation Tactics

By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON

The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 - A Central Intelligence Agency review that grew out of the
furor over abuses at Abu Ghraib prison now includes scrutiny of the agency's
interrogation and detention practices at military-run facilities and other sites
across Iraq, government officials say.

The reassessment, which is more
far-reaching than previously known, could have implications for the agency's
conduct elsewhere, including interrogations of high-level Al Qaeda suspects like
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed who are being held by the C.I.A. in secret facilities
around the world.

Former intelligence officials say that lawyers from
the C.I.A. and the Justice Department have been involved in intensive
discussions in recent months to review the legal basis for some extreme tactics
used at those secret centers, including "waterboarding," in which a detainee is
strapped down, dunked under water and made to believe that he might be
drowned.

"Policies and procedures on detention interrogation in Iraq and
elsewhere have been the focus of intense oversight and scrutiny, and very close
attention has been paid to making them lawful," a senior intelligence official
said Friday.

Over all, the review by the intelligence agency, along
with the investigations and corrective steps already undertaken by the military,
reflect how the government has retreated from an aggressive posture adopted in
the months after the Sept. 11 attacks on how far interrogators could go in
questioning detainees.

Within the military in particular, some of the
harsh procedures authorized until this spring were quickly suspended or
abandoned after the extent of the abuses at Abu Ghraib surfaced in April. This
week, reviews completed by two investigative panels have called for even clearer
rules to be drafted for the military and intelligence agencies to require humane
treatment during interrogation.

Among the questions raised by the
Pentagon reviews is whether intelligence agencies should be required to heed the
same guidelines for interrogation as the military, or whether they should be
permitted more latitude. A report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay about the
abuses at Abu Ghraib said the conduct of C.I.A. personnel at the prison was
perceived by military officials there as more aggressive than that allowed by
the military. The report said the C.I.A.'s conduct had a corrupting influence
on military interrogators and contributed to a view among them that it was
permissible to exceed strict guidelines for interrogations.

Mark
Mansfield, a C.I.A. spokesman, would say only that the agency's inspector
general is conducting "several" reviews of the agency's conduct in Iraq. Mr.
Mansfield said it had not yet been determined when the inquiries would be
completed or whether the results of the probes would be made public.

Among the reviews, intelligence officials say, are an examination of what a
military investigation described as eight "ghost" detainees who were
incarcerated at Abu Ghraib, but who were kept off the prison's roster at the
C.I.A.'s request. In one of those cases, in November 2003, a detainee brought
to the prison by C.I.A. employees but never formally registered with military
guards died at the site, and his body was removed after being wrapped in plastic
and packed in ice.

The man had been detained by Navy Seals, who had hit
him in the head with a rifle butt during his arrest, and the military
investigation said that blow apparently led to his death. But the investigation
suggested that the detainee might have survived if he had been screened by
doctors, as would have been required had he been properly registered with the
military.

The reviews have stirred concern in intelligence and military
circles by officials who fear that decisions to forbid all coercive
interrogation techniques could cost the United States valuable intelligence. A
senior Army official, discussing new rules adopted by the military in a briefing
for reporters on Wednesday, said the restrictions had damaged efforts to obtain
information.

"Interrogators and detainees both know what the limits are,"
the official said. "They know that if the United States captures them, they
will get a medical exam. They'll get their teeth fixed. They will get
essentially a free physical and they will be released if they don't talk after a
certain amount of time."

In interviews in recent days, some current and
former intelligence officials have warned of the danger of showing too much
deference to detainees who espouse extreme anti-American views.

"Let's
keep in mind what the objective is - to get information that will save American
lives," said a senior intelligence official. "And there is an absolute
necessity to use effective interrogation to gain insights on plans to kill
Americans."

Interrogations of suspected Qaeda figures including Mr.
Mohammed, regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, have been
described by the independent commission that investigated those attacks as
having provided rich and important information about terrorist operations.
Intelligence officials have not spelled out in any detail the kinds of
interrogation tactics used on Mr. Mohammed, but they have expressed concern
that he has successfully resisted their efforts to extract information.

An April 2003 C.I.A. report on Mr. Mohammed that is cited in a footnote to the
Sept. 11 commission's report refers in its title to Mr. Mohammed's "Threat
Reporting - Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies.''

In
recent weeks, current and former officials say, the debate about interrogations
and about Mr. Mohammed in particular has been conducted against the real and
urgent backdrop of concern about a potential new terrorist attack.

Mr.
Mohammed's knowledge of Qaeda personnel has become significant again because of
his association with the suspected Qaeda figure known as Issa al-Hindi, or
Dhiren Barot, who was among eight men arrested early this month in Britain and
later charged with terrorist related offenses. The authorities believe that Mr.
Hindi traveled to New York in 2000 and 2001 to conduct surveillance operations
at five financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington.

In
the Sept. 11 commission's final report, Mr. Mohammed is said to have told his
interrogators that he dispatched Mr. Hindi, under the name Issa al-Britani, to
case potential economic targets in New York.

It is not clear whether Mr.
Mohammed was talking about the same reconnaissance described in surveillance
reports that the authorities found in Pakistan last month. But those
surveillance operations are important because they were behind the Bush
administration's decision, announced on Aug. 1, to elevate the threat level in
the three parts of the United States.

It has been known that, after the abuses at Abu Ghraib
were disclosed, the Justice Department abandoned some legal opinions written in
the months after the Sept. 11 attacks that had been used as the basis for the
broad latitude allowed interrogators in using extreme procedures against
suspected Qaeda detainees. In recent months, government lawyers said the legal
opinions were too broad and were being rewritten to restrict the harshest
interrogation measures.

The broader inspector general investigation into
the agency's involvement in detention and intelligence in Iraq since May 2003
was ordered in May by George J. Tenet, who was then director of central
intelligence. But additional questions about the C.I.A.'s practices center on a
small number of high-level suspected Qaeda detainees being held by the agency
outside Iraq in undisclosed locations around the world.

The C.I.A. has
already scaled back some coercive methods used against detainees, although
officials would not discuss specific techniques. Agency officials have demanded
advance Justice Department approval for each tactic used against detainees and a
new legal analysis of federal laws on the subject, including a statute that
makes it a felony for American officials, including C.I.A. employees, to engage
in torture.

One seminal document repudiated by the government was an
August 2002 memo by the Justice Department. It concluded that interrogators
could use extreme techniques on detainees in the effort to prevent terrorism.

The memo suggested that the president could authorize a wide array of
coercive interrogation methods in the campaign against terrorism without
violating international treaties or the federal torture law. It did not specify
any particular procedures but suggested that there were few limits short of
causing the death of a prisoner.

While the memo appeared to give the
C.I.A. wide latitude in adopting tactics to interrogate high-level suspected
Qaeda detainees, it is still unclear exactly what procedures were used or the
extent to which the memo influenced the government's overall thinking about
interrogations of other terror detainees captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere.